Young And Beautiful
by phobic-i
Summary: "Ivan, do you still love me?" Ivan tells his wife how much he loves her.


**Young and Beautiful:**  
_by SongOfDoom_

**「**_" Will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful? "_**」**

Amelia was breath-taking. Waves of gold tumbled down her shoulder blades, the wispy curls playing at her sun-kissed skin. The way it blew with the wind, playing around her shoulders teasingly. Thin eyebrows arched innocently above two ultramarine pools of swirling emotion. Her pink lips were pulled into a delicate smile that seared through the cold of his heart like a white-hot arrow. A modest chest, a slender waist and a flat stomach that curved into a hourglass shape. Long, slim legs that seemed to go on for hours. The stars that twinkled distantly in the dark Russian sky over their heads gleamed, touching her golden hair to a moderate silver that pummeled his own metallic color into the ground.

That was what his beautiful wife looked like thirty-nine years ago.

"Ivan, do you still love me?"

Her voice was trembling, the tone she used dripping with an emotion Ivan could not place - perhaps sadness. His fingers locked tighter around his pen, and he stopped scribbling his initials on the dotted lines of his government paperwork. Ivan looked up at Amelia, his lovely wife for forty years as of the twenty-seventh of this April, and saw her eyes. They were shining and bloodshot, the skin around her eyes red and swollen. "Darling, have you been crying?" Ivan asked, placing his pen neatly on top of his paperwork and pushing his chair back, his large hands flat on his desk. Amelia shook her head, a response he expected; "No," she denied, giving a pitiful sniff. "Answer the question, Ivan. Do you still love me?"

"Why are you asking that?" Ivan replied, tilting his head and focusing all of his attention on her. No, his eyes weren't following the small red bug that crawled along his paperwork, or the flurries of dust that flew up into the beam of light his desk lamp cast. "Of course I do, Amelia, why would I not?"

"Because I'm not beautiful anymore."

Her answer sent a pang through his heart. Ivan, staring at Amelia with his eyes wide, found himself flabbergasted. Of course she was still beautiful! Her golden hair was a few shades lighter than it was in her heyday, shimmering in the dim light of his office almost platinum near the curls rounding off her hair. Her tanned face was creased with laugh lines, lines that would surely deepen and begin to wrinkle within a very short period. Her slim shoulders slumped and her wiry fingers laced themselves together, the golden ring around her finger glittering. "Amelia," Ivan began, guessing his eyes round with pity at this point. "Darling..."

"Don't feed me that bull, Ivan!" Amelia snapped, her voice a higher pitch than earlier. Before Ivan had driven to work that morning, they had sat at the dining table and sipped on their morning coffee together, their hands clasped together and their smiles light. When Ivan had hung his coat on the rack beside the door that evening, Amelia had looked as happy as she always was when he returned home, placing a warm kiss on his cheek and wrapping her arms tightly around his torso. So where was this insecurity coming from? "I know that you don't think I'm beautiful anymore, Ivan," Amelia continued, her voice a whisper. "You used to tell me that I was all the time. You haven't told me that I was beautiful in years."

As Amelia broke off into a bout of sobbing that sent a shiver of guilt through him, Ivan rushed around his desk with a burst of speed he didn't even knew he still held at this age, and snaked his arms around her waist. Her fists pummeled into his chest as he pulled his wife against his chest, resting his chin on top of her graying head. "Amelia," Ivan whispered, surprised to find his own voice choking. "Amelia, my love, you are even more beautiful than you used to be."

"That's a lie!" Amelia shouted, squirming and trying to break out of his arms. "You're just saying that because I mentioned it, you, you mother...!" As Amelia broke off into a fit of cursing, Ivan tightened his arms around her and shifted his head, pressing a gentle peck on her forehead, right between her eyes. Amelia only cursed louder, but her struggles soon faded and stopped all together. Ivan held his wife in his arms, his eyes closed and pain surging through him as his heart ached for her.

"Amelia Faith Jones." Her eyelashes fluttered as she looked at him, her eyes bright with anger and sadness and tears when the name she hadn't heard in thirty-nine years echoed in the death-silent office. "My lovely wife, I always have thought you were beautiful."

April 27th floated through his mind, and Ivan unfolded his left hand from the small of Amelia's back, twisting the golden band around his ring finger. Amelia had been twenty-six, himself twenty-eight, fine ages for marriage. Her foster fathers had finally granted him their blessings, and her arm was locked with one of them (Ivan's first meeting with Arthur Kirkland had not been pleasant and Ivan was still a little frightened whenever his father-in-law came around.), her head nodding as he whispered into her ear. She laughed, the airy sound reaching Ivan's ears through the breathless chatter of the small wedding party, and shifted her head to press at kiss to her father's cheek as he presented her at the alter. Sunlight beamed down on the both of them, turning Amelia to glitter. Ivan had never felt happier after the "I do"s were said, and Amelia was changed from Jones to Braginski, and she threw herself at him, kissing him breathless. (Not that he had much breath throughout the ceremony to begin with.)

They honeymooned in Hawaii for a month, and by the end of it, Ivan was sure he had managed to damage every man's face that focused on his wife's wicked figure for more than three seconds. (Ivan was being generous letting them catch a glance at all!) He cursed Amelia's quick stride as she left him to trail behind, her hips swaying and the denim she wore highlighting the curve of her bottom and making her legs looking even longer in the cutoffs. Ivan was sure he was about to stab his knife into his hand to snag his focus back from Amelia's chest, shown gracefully in the little black dress she wore that night. The next day, Ivan held his lemonade so tightly, it exploded all over him (Amelia pulled him into the unisex restroom, holding up a skimpy-looking swimsuit and asking him to tie the strings for her), scraped a majority of the skin off of his right forearm after falling on the slippery concrete (after Amelia dived into the chlorinated pool and swam around for a while, pulled herself out of the water and looking absolutely gorgeous with the water rolling down her curves and her hair plastered to her skin), humiliated himself when the Hispanic maid cleaning their room raised an eyebrow in a downward direction (Ivan shouted at her in Russian, ushering her out and slamming the door in her face), and managed to trip and burn the left side of his face on the carpet (after Amelia followed him up to the hotel room, demanding why he rushed off and letting the towel she dried off with drop to her feet, slinking up to him curled on the bed and leaning over him; the view was the straw that broke the camel's back). But Ivan thinks it was worth it in retrospect when he stared down at her beautiful face, twisted with pleasure and flushed with the most adorable shade of pink, for the remainder of that day, reminding him of how truly beautiful she was.

Amelia had been devastated when she was declared scientifically infertile. The news had destroyed her, shattering her very earth. It took years to finally soothe her, Ivan suggesting the adoption of a child but being shot down. Amelia's own body contradicted her, the motherly instinct nestled deep in the recesses of her calling to her to try and do something she physically could not do. (The thought of surrogation didn't cross his mind until years later, after Amelia had finally calmed her cries and accepted the depressing information better than expected of her. He just decided to leave her be for now, his confidence shrivelling at the thought of stirring her overwhelming sadness again.) Ivan had watched his wife crying all those nights, her beautiful face flushed with pale and her cheeks sticky with tears and her body quivering as she stifled her pitiful sobbing, his heart wrenching with pain for her. He felt guilty for thinking so, but even if her nose ran with snot and her hair was grimy and tangled and her pajamas wrinkled after being worn for over a week without wash, Amelia was still gorgeous to him.

Amelia had managed to elude Father Time's wrinkled and knobby, pale and liver-spotted fingers for thirty-one years. Ivan found himself glaring at less and less people who stared at his beautiful wife. As her wavy hair faded from golden to bleached, her brilliant eyes glazing over, her dainty hands quivering as she poured their coffee and served his food, her beaming smile fading into a pursed-lipped frown over their time together. Amelia tugged at her thinning hair as she aged, glaring at the gray hair curled in her bangs. Amelia spoke to him less and less, only wishing him good morning and night, assuming he had good days at work even when he didn't. Ivan found himself taking it poorly, his focus on his wife and her distance. Ivan lay in bed beside his wife, wondering sort of angrily where his confidence had withered away to, wishing he could wrap his arms around Amelia and telling her he loved her. But when Ivan finally steeled his will, Amelia's breathing was deep and soft snoring was the only sound in the room, and Ivan just turned over and stared at the alarm clock sitting on the nightstand and watching the numbers flip from ten to eleven to twelve. What was happening to him and his beautiful wife, where did their happiness go?

"Ivan Braginski!"

Ivan jolted, his eyes flying open. He hissed as a shoulder jerked up, clipping him on the chin and making him bite his tongue. His mouth tasting of copper, Ivan pulled himself away and blinked down at her. Amelia crossed her arms over her chest, glaring up at him. "Da?"

"You didn't hear a word I just said, did you?" Amelia demanded harshly, her voice sharp and her eyes cold and Ivan's heart plummented at her anger. He let out a sigh, his breath stirring her hair and slingshoting him back into the memory of her when he first met her, so beautiful with her golden hair blowing in the cold Russian breeze and her blue eyes shimmering with excitement as she conversed with him in Russian, her annunciation slightly off and her body language wild. She was so amusing, Ivan had grown fond of her quickly. He shook himself, blinking down at that same woman in his arms, her hair platinum and her eyes narrowed angrily and her muscles tensed, their legs tangled together but her upper half moved away from him defiantly, her head inclined to match his stare. "Well?"

"I did."

"You didn't! You were too busy being weird to listen to me!"

"I was thinking about you, Amelia, how beautiful you've always been," Ivan stammered, his heart shuddering with embarrassment when his office fell silent, Amelia averting her eyes and staring down at a button on his shirt. "Always so beautiful, so perfect." Amelia lifted a hand, clenching it into a tight fist, but letting it fall against his broad chest with her slender fingers splayed. "I don't know how I was even able to breathe, you took my breath away. I knew, as soon as I met you, what I was born for: you. I never could describe it, except for calling the two of us 'a perfect match made in heaven.'" Amelia scoffed, her hair hanging limply in her face. "I loved you, Amelia..." Amelia stiffened, her muscles tensed at his trailing statement. She opened her mouth to retort and Ivan silenced her by pressing a kiss to her forehead. "...I love you now..." He lifted a hand, closing her gaping jaw with his fingers, dipping his head and brushing his dry, cracked lips against her soft pair. "...and I always will."

**「**_" I know you will, I know you will. I know that you will... "_**」**


End file.
